Death Of The Daily

I don’t have much to say about the demise of Rupert Murdoch’s iPad-only newspaper, The Daily, except that it doesn’t surprise me. I took advantage of the free subscription offer back when it launched, but I checked out after two days. It was narrow in scope, and you couldn’t link to stories, or send them to friends. There wasn’t a lot on it of interest, and it was more trouble than it was worth. This I decided after two days, and never went back.

Why would people think that you could have a viable media business model while catering only to people who own iPads? Because our media world is made up of people from a particular social and cultural class. Broadly speaking, they’re a myopic and provincial bunch, and so when they look around at their peers and social cohort, they see that everybody owns an iPad and assume that’s true of the world at large. You’re sure to see tons of analysis of this story in the usual places in the coming hours– The Atlantic, Slate– and it’ll be written by people from the same narrow group that worked at The Daily in the first place. As such, they’ll be lacking an important perspective, which is what the world looks like outside of the narrow slice of educated digitally-connected strivers who write the Internet. It’s the most consistent and determinative aspect of our media: it’s a homogenous group that fancies itself diverse and thus cannot see how incredibly out of touch it is with how most people live. I invite reporters to come here to Lafayette Indiana and ask around at the Village Pantry about the demise of The Daily.

Freddie writes from the left (in case you don’t know his work), but he is absolutely, utterly right about the narrowness and homogeneity of our media class. Over the course of my career in media, I have often observed that there is very little diversity in our mainstream media, though from within the bubble, diversity is fetishized. “Diversity” in this sense usually boils down to the worldview of a certain kind of college-educated urban bourgeois person. This, I suppose, is to be expected, given the professionalization of journalism. It has been my experience, though, that few of us writers or editors at the newspapers where I’ve worked have much genuine curiosity at all about the lives and opinions of the secretaries, maintenance crew, and other non-college types alongside whom we worked, except insofar as they confirmed our pet theories about the Way The World Works.

I concede that I bear guilt on that front too. It’s damned difficult for anyone to keep an open mind, and keep questioning one’s own prejudices; it’s especially hard to do so when so many people around you not only agree with your views, but also share the belief that being a professional journalist makes one more inclined to question conventional wisdom. In this way, it was probably good for me to be such a cultural and ideological outlier in the newsrooms in which I’ve worked, but of course that did not make me necessarily as curious or as questioning as I ought to have been. No one person can know everything. No one person can ever know everything that he doesn’t know. This is the theory, I think, behind why we need “diversity” in the newsroom, but it doesn’t work out that way in reality. Looking like America is not the same thing as thinking like America.

In the past, American journalism might have been more reflective of working-class points of view — I’m just guessing this, based on the fact that journalism wasn’t always a profession you needed a college degree to enter — but it certainly did not tell the stories of black folks, or other minorities. Whatever the faults of the news media today, it’s better than it used to be on this front. I wonder, though, whether there is any general aspiration within media culture to tell stories outside the narrow niche of producers, writers, editors, and people like themselves, or people who care about the things they care about.

On the other hand, I wonder too if there is any aspiration among consumers of media culture to see, hear, and read stories about people unlike themselves.

Is it hard to succeed with a general-interest publication (or broadcast) today because the culture is more fragmented? Or because the media have fragmented? Or both? Is it the case that media in the pre-cable, pre-Internet days were based on an artificial construct: the idea that there was a common culture and an account of the facts that we could all agree on? Does the media we have today better reflect reality, or are we, in our fragmentation and self-silo-ization, less able to perceive reality?

This is not exactly what Freddie is talking about, but it’s not too far from it.

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12 Responses to Death Of The Daily

In the past, American journalism might have been more reflective of working-class points of view — I’m just guessing this, based on the fact that journalism wasn’t always a profession you needed a college degree to enter

These working class folks now get their news and commentary from talk radio. Journalism is for a growing smaller group (elites) with more discriminating tastes. I hope the NYT, WP, et al. have a pre-written obituary of themselves and journalism.

Slightly off topic: I want to make one point about what Freddie is saying.

Why would people think that you could have a viable media business model while catering only to people who own iPads? Because our media world is made up of people from a particular social and cultural class.

Partly, maybe. But isn’t it also partly because the types of people under the age of 50 or so who still read newspapers regularly are likely to own iPads by now? Isn’t that just a demographic reality? Furthermore, isn’t distribution via iPads and iPad-type devices clearly the wave of the future, all but divinely ordained to replace daily dead tree delivery? The fact that someone tried to gain the first mover advantage here with a low cost, keep-it-simple business model doesn’t strike as evidence of media elites being out of touch. It looks a lot more like good old fashioned entrepreneurship that just didn’t work out.

Our media elites may be out of touch; I’m not disputing that. I’m just not sure they’re out of touch in the way FdB thinks they’re out of touch.

“Partly, maybe. But isn’t it also partly because the types of people under the age of 50 or so who still read newspapers regularly are likely to own iPads by now? ”

The trick is to realize it’s specifically ‘iPad’ that hyperexpensive device from Apple and not “mobile devices”

Many people under 50 use some sort of mobile device. Some who have the cash use an iPhone. Others who have no love for Apple use Android or a competitor. Still others use cheaper smartphones, like the $60 items MetroPCS offers. Others prefer tablets since they are MUCH easier to read. Myself, I’m on a Laptop, though my next phone will be a low priced iPhone. Poorer people have a desktop since they can’t afford a smartphone or any of those other devices (for quite a few of those, their ‘desktop’ is the Library computer).

Oh, and I think it’s still true that half of the country doesn’t have broadband though many of them use something else to get online.

So MANY of us are on the internet.

Not many of us specifically use iPhones.

That it’s assumed that many of us DO have them is exactly his point: it’s a complete disconnect on how those outside your circle live. It’s like living in Rural America assuming everyone in the country has a car.

To be honest, though, I think the biggest issue he had wasn’t in being so specific. Being specific is fine since, as he said, you can’t know everything. The Daily could’ve been fine with an audience that’s able to afford a high end smartphone, if that’s who they wanted to reach. The bigger issue is forgetting that you, indeed, are not the majority: you are a small, tiny portion of a very mixed nation.

“But isn’t it also partly because the types of people under the age of 50 or so who still read newspapers regularly are likely to own iPads by now? ”

No.

I am under 50 as are my friends and siblings; we are mostly in the 31-42 age range in the DC area. We are all engaged in keeping up with the news and there is not an iPad among us. One or two iPhones I think, but no iPads or non-Apple tablets. I don’t think iPads are used as widely as Apple fans think they are.

Keep in mind that the pre-Internet media was pretty fragmented at times, too. Cities and towns had more than one daily English-language newspaper (NYC had nine as late as the 50′s), but there were also newspapers in Italian, German, Polish, Yidish, Chinese and a host of other languages. Not to mention the black press, and publications in English for the Irish and Japanese-American communities, to name just two. Most of these publications are either gone or reduced in frequency.

The fragmentation that we talk about these days is in the general interest, English-language media, although even here, I wonder whether conservative talk radio should be seen as such a new phenomenon, given the Father Coughlins, Bob Grants and Barry Farbers of the past. And the newspapers were often less general interest than we might think: New York’s elite might have read both the Times and the Herald Tribune, but they probably didn’t subscribe to the Journal American or Daily News, and I’m not sure too many of the white ethnics who read the latter also read the Post.

i did not use the internet for most of my news until 2007. After three months of reading the larger news blogs complain against the ‘MSM’ for narrowness, it was clear that the anti/post/un/alternative sources existed in their own echo chamber. Read one, you’ve read them all. Often, the ‘anti’ pivots directly off what the ‘MSM’ covers. Even the back and forth among top blogs is a bit too narcissitic for me. You really have to read foreign news sources to make sense out of the world.

I think part of the problem was people thought of it as something for an iPhone or an iPad because of the way it was launched. It was available for the Kindle Fire and some Android tablets too but people don’t seem to know that. Only a small problem amongst many but problems stack pretty well. The more you have the more trouble you are going to have.

So which is it, is the media fragmented, or monolithic in its ignorance of most Americans’ points of view? I guess both. But there are worse things, there’s a point past which media gets too diverse and starts echoing various increasingly unlikely conspiracy theories, like in the Middle East where the Arab press tends to blame everything on the Zionists. This is a sign of an unhealthy elite trying to deflect attention away from its own problems, and a public too eager to let that happen. I’ll take our slightly out-of-touch media over that, at least.